CES 2005: Hands-On: Untold Legends

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Doth thou knoweth of the Brotherhood of the Blade. Now, you shall ... Huzzah!

By Nix

Sony Online Entertainment's debut title for PlayStation Portable, Untold Legends: Brotherhood of the Blade, may begin as an unlikely title for the company -- it is not SOE's first action-RPG, but for a company most known for its MMOs, this handheld title is still something out of left field. Luckily, even offline, this game should make use of the company's multiplayer expertise, and its incredible visuals and complex gameplay should ensure that plenty of other gamers will be around owning the game for players to quest with.

Playing a lot like Sony Online's own Champions of Norrath series, but featuring a different development team working with an all-new graphics engine, Untold Legends takes place in a city that is finding itself the center of what becomes an epic battle of good and evil. The story turns out to be a lot more deep than the "beat back the baddies" tale first described -- the player begins the game as one of the city of Aven's trained defenders, and is called upon when strange phenomenon begin to occur to the townspeople. At first, it's just unfortunate sicknesses and other unexplained events that seem to inflict the people of Aven, but as you begin your quest, it has become clear that an evil force is behind the events, and things will spiral downwards from there. Aven is your hub in the game, and as you progress in gameplay, you will be able to see the evil slowly gain its foothold on the city, and be spurred on to save it from impending doom. You will eventually learn the legend of a secret order called the Brotherhood of the Blade from these troubled townsfolk, and if you find out who this order is and learn its secrets, you may have a chance to find out what evil is causing these people such hardship.

Depth in this action-RPG shouldn't be a problem, as 107 levels pack the game and are constantly restructured by randomly generated elements. SOE has advanced technology at work for the random elements of the game, as the map will be regenerated in both little and very large ways -- in our playtime, we were able to see not only random treasure locations and slight shifts in the game map's directions, but also large changes where landmark features like body pits and towers were different from one playthrough or another. There is a general design to each stage, and the three boss stages feature hand-crafted challenges, but normal play and multiplayer play will randomize the miniboss battle locations, dead end spots, and other elements to keep the play fresh every play.

It is a new design team leading the quest, but many of the proven elements of Champions have been included. SOE has kept the circular chooser for magic, mapped to the joypad, for easy access to your spells. The four character classes can be heavily customized for visual design, so that each member of the game's four-player WiFi quests is unique and easily visible.

Even though there are similarities, this exclusive PSP game does go beyond what's been played before from SOE's previous action-RPGs. A gem system is used for customizing your blade, so you can turn your axes and swords into special weapons for given uses -- with certain enemies more susceptible to fire or ice or other attacks, you will be able to assign upgraded properties to the best weapon for a given job. You will be able to also collect a pet, which will have some battle capabilities (in our test version, our pet was mostly a pain magnet decoy used to lure boss attacks away from ourselves.) And as far as multiplayer bouts, the game design attempts to make both single-player and multiplayer equally as deep -- leveling up and character building takes place in Co-Op play, and the level of challenge is maintained by boosting the enemy AI to the level of the highest player in the party.

In our playtime, the most clear thing to hit us was that we need to really get some practice in. Champions should have trained us, but this being a real RPG epic, it took us a while to remind ourselves that the smooth control in the action still would not be enough to save us when the action got heated. This game kicked our butts up and down -- the game engine allows a ferocious number of enemies to be simultaneously beating you down at a time (SOE's producer said he's seen at least 14 enemies on screen at once.) The smarts behind the enemies made things more complicated -- magic-casters, for example, will work together with melee brutes so that you're being beaten from near and far, and will run away if you try to charge through the heavy blows to strike them down. Enemies aren't just little orcs and wyversn, either -- we were beaten back and forth by two gigantic Ent-sized beasts that dominated the screen real estate, even when we zoomed the camera back to its furthest (the screenshots all show the nearest view of the game to show off its amazing texture work and detailed character models.) Once you get into the depths of the gameplay, learning the resource management and attack patterns, you will have a better chance of getting to face some of the game's tremendous boss creatures. The game's producer took us face to face with a massive spider boss, which looked and moved with such realistic menace that we're hungry for more of the game.

SOE is planning to release Untold Legends as a PSP launch title, and from what we saw of the game, it's right on target to ship in the next few months. The game engine ran perfectly smooth at all times in the demo, and we only saw one graphic glitch in an otherwise impressive early display of PSP visual splendor. Look for updated impressions and details as soon as SOE invites us to learn more about the secrets of the Brotherhood of the Blade.